Take your shoes off, cover your head, wash your hands and step down into the flowing stream to cleanse your feet of an impurity they may carry. Once you have prepared yourself, follow the white marble steps to a gold garnished temple that has enchanting music drawing you to its doors. After three months in India, I finally stepped foot into my first Sikh temple, Gurudwara ...
2017 Davidson Semester-in-India
Final Thoughts on My Time in India
We are blasting through our Northern Tour of India and at the same time that it is exhausting, different, and just generally overwhelming, I have also somehow found the time to reflect on the entire trip here. There are some constants on life in India that I’ve noticed and some things that are different depending on where you are, in the north or the south and if you are in a ...
Air Pollution: Don’t Let our Future Go Up in Smoke
As I walked out of the airport in Delhi, we were greeted with a thick brownish-grey smog in the horizon. Immediately it felt like home - Santiago, the capital of Chile – which is also one of most the highly air polluted cities of the world. Back home when I wake up, I enjoy the clean air because the heavy-duty air filter in my bedroom is constantly on. The only way to ...
Hindu rituals and the environment
Hinduism and the environment The five elements of earth, air, fire, water, and space are believed to make up brahman in the Hindu faith. Upanishad explains that “From Brahman arises space, from space arises air, from air arises fire, from fire arises water and from water arises earth”. Brahman represents the divine and ultimate god. Any pollution done to the earth is ...
Drinking Pesticides: The Effects of Climate Change on Farmers
Do you know where your food comes from? Apart from the supermarket or vendor that you buy your food from, do you know who grows this food? Have you had a conversation with the farmer? Not many people know where their food is grown or by whom, or if these farmers live happy lives with enough money to care for their families or if they barely make ends meet. For thousands of ...
Ecofeminism and Why Scientists (and everyone else) Should Care about the Humanities
We just came back from Bangalore where we studied for a while at a place called Visthar in the outskirts of the city. While at Visthar, we had a series of lectures about the environment, specifically how to care for the environment and for the people, animals and plants that make it up. Here’s a highlight reel of our time at Visthar, the lectures and experiences that I most ...
The Unexpected
This is a list that I have been compiling over the last months of my stay in India. Here are a few things that I did not know before coming and some that I wish I had known. 1. You will get used to all of the people. After your first experience of being squished in a train during rush hour you will be desensitized to the amount of people on the street and in public ...
What’s with all the Tea?
Everywhere you go in India, you are offered tea. The offer of chai is everywhere from on the train before you travel back to Chennai to a lonely street on the Andaman Islands before you go to a national park. The constant offer of chai makes you wonder after a while, why is it absolutely everywhere? How did such a simple drink of just leaves and hot water make it so big that ...
Population Control Policy in India: A Dark History Uncovered
Today, India is the world’s second most populated country, second only to China by a gap that is shrinking each year. Looking back a century to the early 1900’s, India was a very different place. The population was unstable due to intense famine, influenza outbreaks, plague, and malaria. Individually, these outbreaks took major tolls on the country, but the combination of all ...
Ghost Towns Of The Sea
John Williams See video on bottom of post. Ghost Towns Of The Sea The Andaman Islands are known for complex and beautiful coral reef ecosystems. These ecosystems are important for the islands’ eco-tourism and fishing industry. Red Skin Island, in the Mahatma Gandhi Marine National Park, is a beautiful recreational park with snorkeling and hiking. I got the ...
